Ogg's World by Doug Ogg

Curious Times - October 2

THIS IS GONNA HURT

Every year we get at least one story about a dentist who snaps. This year our horror story comes from the town of Neu-Ulm, Germany, where a dentist made a special house call to a patient whose insurance company didn’t pay for her dental work. According to police reports the dentist arrived at her house with his equipment, forced her into the living room, tied her hands and forced open her mouth in order to remove two dental bridges worth £320 (about $650). According to the victim, he never said a single word the entire time. (The Telegraph)

who WANTs TO TALK?

Great news for married men. A new book by a couple of psychotherapists claims that talking about your relationship is one of the worst things you can do for the long-term health of your marriage. According to the authors of the book How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It, talking to a man about the relationship simply makes him feel criticised and ashamed for not measuring up which causes him to withdraw and shuts down the lines of communication. “The number-one myth about relationships is that talking helps,” says co-author Patricia Love. “The truth is, more often than not, it makes things worse.” (CNN)

FUNNY MONEY

Someone once said “you’ll never go broke overestimating the stupidity of other people” and a man in North Carolina has proven it once again as he successfully used an obviously bogus $200 bill to buy $150 worth of groceries at a supermarket last week. The bill was decorated with a portrait of George W. Bush and a drawing of the White House complete with lawn signs reading “We like ice cream” and “USA deserves a tax cut.” (ncwanted.com)

A FULL DAY’S SUPPLY OF MOLD

Unfortunately nobody sells them yet but someone came up with the perfect solution for anyone who has ever had their food stolen out of the office frdge. The Anti-Theft Lunch Bag is a normal sandwich bag with green moldy splotches printed on it in order to make the sandwich inside look like a biology experiment that’s been sitting in the back of the fridge for far too long.

GOOD SEX costs

A team of economists from the U.S. and Britain have finished a study which claims that having a good sex life is worth about $50,000 a year to the average person, while being married brings almost as much happiness as $100,000. Their research involved interviews with almost 100,000 subjects and tried to establish what value people place on their sex lives and marriages. “The financial values that we calculated are what it would cost to compensate someone for a happy marriage in money terms,” said Dartmouth College economist David Blanchflower. Their results showed that most people would need about an extra $50,000 in yearly income to equal the contentment they receive from their sex lives. Sex psychologist Petruska Clarkson added, “I think that figure is an underestimate. [Sex] reduces stress, increases our immune system and reduces pain. Regular sex improves not only your physical health but your mental health.” (Sunday Times)

NO ONE IS INNOCENT

A survey of 5,000 people in Britain found that the average person breaks the law once a day. The most common crime was speeding (admitted to by 46 percent of respondents), followed by talking on the phone while driving (40 percent), littering (36 percent) and downloading music illegally (35 percent). (Daily Mail)

A PLACE WHERE WHITE IS COOLER THAN BLACK

While we wait for the engineering geniuses of the world to figure out how to beat global warming we might want to consider some lo-tech solutions in the meantime. For example, the LA Times reports that if the world’s 100 largest cities painted the roofs of all the buildings white and used more reflective materials on their roads, the global cooling effect would offset 10 years of emissions growth in only one year. “I call it win-win-win,” said Hashem Akbari, a physicist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “First, a cooler environment not only saves energy but improves comfort. Second, cooling a city by a few degrees dramatically reduces smog. And the third win is offsetting global warming.”

The king and I and I and i and i . . .

While the excitement meter on your crummy life continues to hover between “lame” and “blah,” the King of Swaziland spent most of last week trying to choose a new wife out of 20,000 bare-breasted teenage girls who danced before him in that country’s annual Reed Dance Festival. Poor guy. Despite attempts to modernize that country’s archaic attitudes towards women, the King continues to wield absolute power and the tradition of picking a new wife each year from Swaziland’s thousands of virgin girls continues. King Mswati III has taken 14 wives since he came to power in 1986, following in the footsteps of the previous monarch who ended his reign with 70 wives and 400 children. In 2002, the mother of the king’s new wife began a lawsuit alleging that the king had kidnapped her daughter, but the court ruled that the king has the right to select wives in the traditional way. Last year, the king even took back the one small step toward his culture’s enlightenment by abolishing the law against having sex with teenage girls. The king himself initiated the rule in 2001, but has since repeatedly broken his own law and been forced to pay the fine of several cows. (Reuters)

I-READ-IT-ON-THE-INTERNET-SO-IT-MUST-BE-TRUE FACT OF THE WEEK

91 percent of adults pick their nose on a regular basis and eight percent of those people eat their pickings.

curioustimes.com